The Call of Duty series had it all figured out and was consistently one of the best console shooters every year. However, the initial reception of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare tells a different story with 3.3 million "thumbs down" and counting for its Release Trailer on YouTube. Things aren't looking good at Infinity Ward, but the team has until the Nov. 4 Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare release date to turn everything around.
Infinity Ward ran two Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare betas over the past two weekends and while the betas certainly did a lot to raise some hype for the game, the beta is meant to iron out some of the details as well.
The Beta tested Infinite Warfare's new matchmaking system and also noted a lot of feedback to fine tune the balance of the games. The matchmaking system now recognizes a player's skill, geographic categorization, and also cleaned up dead lobbies. However, this all added time on the lobby, so the team fined-tuned the game server's information tracker to seek open lobbies more quickly.
Gameplay balance-wise, the Infinite Warfare determined to buff the shotgun with more damage, nerf the sniper rifle by turning off aim assist until the optics are to the player's eye, and lowered the time necessary for health regeneration across the board.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare arrives Nov. 4. Check out the complete post-beta patch notes here:
WEAPONS
We received a ton of great data from the Beta, allowing us to take a hard look at all of the guns and we will make changes as needed. Here are some of the immediate tweaks we will be implementing.
Shotguns
- Increased the consistency of shotgun damage.
- Shotgun damage at longer range has been increased.
- Slightly increased the one shot kill range.
- Both the Reaver and Banshee have received a slight bonus to their 1 trigger pull kill range.
Snipers
- Bullet spread at the hip no longer gets smaller as the player ADS’s. Once the scope reaches the player’s eye, the bullet spread goes instantly to zero.
- Sniper aim assist was reduced slightly for the KBS Longbow and the other bolt action snipers. Our turn rate while Aimed Down Sights is still slowed to help with precision aiming.
- Sniper-class weapons no longer have any Aim Assist until the optic fully reaches the player’s eye.
- For the ELO and Scout optics on snipers, the idle sway while ADS has been increased along with the player’s view bounce when moving. Because these optics are less zoomed in, the view bounce and the sway are felt less. These changes are to promote more stationary aiming and firing with these optics.
- The Tracking Chip optic’s visuals have been improved.
- Reduced bonus of the Quickdraw attachment on snipers.
- Updated snipers to have more flinch when getting shot.
Launchers
- The Howitzer Grenade launcher can now be fired from the hip instead of requiring full ADS
SMGs
- The RPR Evo epic variant (Ripper) has had a tuning pass to increase recoil given its bonus fire rate
PERKS & RIG TRAITS
- – We fixed a bug where, in addition to reducing flinch, it was also reducing recoil. This would then stack with Gun Perks and the Foregrip Attachment. This bonus reduction has been removed.
- – Fixed issues with speed not being retained
- Marked Target – The temporary red marker on the victim has been toned down
HEALTH REGEN AND SPAWNING
- Health Regen time has been reduced.
- Infusion bonus reduced.
- Continuing to refine spawn system on beta maps, will assess remaining launch maps in live environment.
ECONOMY
- Increased salvage gain in mission teams.
- Changed currency value in supply drops.
- Increased drop rate of keys in round-based modes.
SCORESTREAKS AND RIGS
Scorestreaks
- Increased health, bullet damage, and weapon accuracy up close to help with target acquisition
- Increased health, increased weapon accuracy to help with target acquisition, slight increase in fire rate, and slight damage increase on splash damage
- Increased speed of tracking rockets
- Increase damage of both tracking and straight fire rockets
- Slight decrease in both time to the initial drop and the time between each subsequent drop
- Updated area damage to be consistent inner to outer
Rigs
- Refining payload balance
- Slight tweaks to gameplay balance across rigs
MODES
- : When carrying the Drone, the score-per-second bonus has been bumped from 5 score per second to 10 score per second. Scorestreak carrier bonus is unaffected.
- Gun Game : Now features all classic weapons. In future updates, weapons with alternate functions will retain their state upon spawn.
- : When you step off a flag, the current capture bar progress starts to decay. The rate of this decay has been halved from the Beta. This allows players to hop off a flag to defend it and then get back on the flag with less progress loss
MATCHMAKING
- Potential player evaluation was too strict. We were doing some very thorough testing of your connection to other players before placing you in a lobby with those players. This turned out to be a bit too thorough, and eventually was relaxed, leading to shorter matching times.
- Incorrect geographic categorization. There was an issue in our geolocation system which was causing some players to be incorrectly categorized. This was also resolved during the beta, improving matchmaking times.
- Dead lobby cleanup. The process which cleans up unused or dead lobby information from our back end was taking too long. This was causing a number of slowdowns when searching for a match.
- The matchmaker was always quite good at generating new lobbies, but one thing we noticed was that queueing into a join in progress situation was taking much longer. This was due to some issues in the way we track information about the lobbies that are currently playing a match. These issues were also addressed during the beta, and sped up the join in progress case immensely.
TTK (TIME TO KILL / ENGAGEMENT)
- We know a lot of you had different experiences with TTK during the Beta. With the above adjustments to dedicated servers, matchmaking, and weapon tuning, we think you’ll find that the TTK will be more balanced at launch, both on the attacking and receiving end. We’ll continue to monitor and balance throughout the year as need and would love your feedback in the process.
- We’re always looking at TTK and will continue to balance and monitor
DEDICATED SERVERS
- One of the major infrastructure changes we made this project was how dedicated server allocations work. We're using a new load balancing system on the servers themselves, as well as pretty heavily changed how the game chooses a datacenter to use, and requests a dedicated server from that datacenter.
- At the start of the Beta, you may have noticed some host migrations and some poorer quality matches. We discovered some issues where the new system was dropping our dedicated server utilization numbers way below target. After some tweaks and fixes we were able dramatically improve our dedicated server utilization for the second weekend and beyond.
